Pages

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

CHALLENGE: Clear the Shelf Challenge

I find month after month that books that I've been wanting to read "just for fun" are piling up. I buy them, but never seem to have time to read them. So I'm creating this challenge in an attempt to get myself to read some of those books. I've chosen 15 of my most desired books from my accumulating collection, and put them on a shelf. My goal is to clear that shelf! The question is how long it will take to do so? Many of the books are well over 500 pages long. I'm guessing it'll take me a couple of years at least. Even if I were able to do one a month (which I seriously doubt), I'd be looking at a year and a half.

The books on my list:

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

Can you commit the perfect crime?

Pilgrim
is the codename for a man who doesn't exist. The adopted son of a
wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for
US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he
wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But
that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben
Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel
room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her
features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a
textbook murder - and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an
unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying
race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to
make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on
the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren
wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would
commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

In the present day, as
the man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos.
Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, is so shattered by the spread of
violence and infection that she continues to plan for her child’s
arrival even as society dissolves around her. Kittridge, known to the
world as “Last Stand in Denver,” has been forced to flee his stronghold
and is now on the road, dodging the infected, armed but alone and well
aware that a tank of gas will get him only so far. April is a teenager
fighting to guide her little brother safely through a landscape of death
and ruin. These three will learn that they have not been fully
abandoned—and that in connection lies hope, even on the darkest of
nights.

One hundred years in the future, Amy and the others fight
on for humankind’s salvation . . . unaware that the rules have changed.
The enemy has evolved, and a dark new order has arisen with a vision of
the future infinitely more horrifying than man’s extinction. If the
Twelve are to fall, one of those united to vanquish them will have to
pay the ultimate price.

A heart-stopping thriller rendered with
masterful literary skill, The Twelve is a grand and gripping tale of
sacrifice and survival.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

“I can allow myself to
write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life
are dead…” writes the heroine of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a
quite ordinary, unnamed middle-aged woman who awakens to find she is
the last living human being. Surmising her solitude is the result of a
too successful military experiment, she begins the terrifying work of
not only survival, but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a
simple and moving talk — of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of
counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one’s
name — and a disturbing meditation on 20th century history.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

A richly
inventive novel about a centuries-old vampire, a spellbound witch, and
the mysterious manuscript that draws them together.

Deep in the stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana
Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the
course of her research. Descended from an old and distinguished line of
witches, Diana wants nothing to do with sorcery; so after a furtive
glance and a few notes, she banishes the book to the stacks. But her
discovery sets a fantastical underworld stirring, and a horde of
daemons, witches, and vampires soon descends upon the library. Diana has
stumbled upon a coveted treasure lost for centuries-and she is the only
creature who can break its spell.

Debut novelist Deborah
Harkness has crafted a mesmerizing and addictive read, equal parts
history and magic, romance and suspense. Diana is a bold heroine who
meets her equal in vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, and gradually
warms up to him as their alliance deepens into an intimacy that violates
age-old taboos. This smart, sophisticated story harks back to the
novels of Anne Rice, but it is as contemporary and sensual as the Twilightseries-with an extra serving of historical realism.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl MarlantesIntense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhornis an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line.
It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas,
and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain
jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood.
Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also
monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition.
Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover
between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous
superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and
outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the
raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them
forever.Written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Marine veteran, Matterhornis a visceral and spellbinding novel about what it is like to be a
young man at war. It is an unforgettable novel that transforms the
tragedy of Vietnam into a powerful and universal story of courage,
camaraderie, and sacrifice: a parable not only of the war in Vietnam but
of all war, and a testament to the redemptive power of literature.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

A powerful, blazingly
honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke
down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the
wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage
was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she
made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest
Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington
State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance
hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish
and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a
life that had come undone.

Strayed faces down rattlesnakes
and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty
and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style,
sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the
terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds
on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World by Lynne McTaggartThe book you hold in
your hands is revolutionary, a groundbreaking exploration of the science
of intention.Drawing on the findings of leading scientists from around
the world, The Intention Experiment demonstrates that thought is a thing that affects other things. It is also the first book to invite you, the reader, to take an active part in its original research.

Using cutting-edge research conducted at Princeton,MIT, Stanford, and many other prestigious universities and laboratories, The Intention Experiment
reveals that the universe is connected by a vast quantum energy
field.Thought generates its own palpable energy, which you can use to
improve your life and, when harnessed together with an interconnected
group, to change the world.

In The Intention Experiment,
internationally bestselling author Lynne McTaggart takes you on a
gripping, mind-blowing journey to the furthest reaches of
consciousness.As she narrates the exciting developments in the science
of intention, she also profiles the colorful scientists and renowned
pioneers who study the effects of focused group intention on
scientifically quantifiable targets -- animal, plant, and human.

McTaggart offers a practical program to get in touch with your own
thoughts, to increase the activity and strength of your intentions, and
to begin achieving real change in your life. You are then invited to
participate in an unprecedented experiment: Using The Intention Experiment
website to coordinate your involvement and track results, you and other
participants around the world will focus your power of intention on
specific targets, giving you the opportunity to become a part of
scientific history. A new Afterword by the author recounts the successes
of the several Intention Experiments so far.

The Intention Experiment
forces you to rethink what it is to be human. It proves that we're
connected to everyone and everything -- and that discovery demands that
we pay better attention to our thoughts, intentions, and actions. Here's
how you can.

Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin

In 1897, an aspiring
politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known
as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends -- —mostly poor cotton farmers --
form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople
they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long
campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent
suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham war
are four people: the aging sheriff sympathetic to both sides; the
widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech;
a ruthless detective who wages his own war against the gang; and a
young store clerk who harbors a terrible secret.

Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the events of dark days that led the people involved to discover their capacity for good, evil, or for both.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #2) by Douglas Adams

Facing annihilation at
the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only
happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they
hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Sent by their mother to
live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern
town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and
the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back
at her mother's side in St. Louis, Mayais attacked by a man any times
her age-and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years
later, in San Francisco, Maya learns about love for herself, and the
kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great
authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow
her to be free instead of imprisoned

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

It is an epic drama of adventure, courage, ruthlessness and passion by one of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed storytellers.In
1848 a motley crew of Danish sailors sets sail from the small island
town of Marstal to fight the Germans. Not all of them return – and those
who do will never be the same. Among them is the daredevil Laurids
Madsen, who promptly escapes again into the anonymity of the high seas.As
soon as he is old enough, his son Albert sets off in search of his
missing father on a voyage that will take him to the furthest reaches of
the globe and into the clutches of the most nefarious company. Bearing a
mysterious shrunken head, and plagued by premonitions of bloodshed, he
returns to a town increasingly run by women – among them a widow intent
on liberating all men from the tyranny of the sea.From the barren
rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the
roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We,
The Drowned spans four generations, two world wars and a hundred years.
Carsten Jensen conjures a wise, humorous, thrilling story of fathers and
sons, of the women they love and leave behind, and of the sea’s
murderous promise. This is a novel destined to take its place among the
greatest seafaring literature.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

The men on board HMS
Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the 1845 Franklin
Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the
legendary Northwest Passage, they are as scientifically supported an
enterprise as has ever set forth. As they enter a second summer in the
Arctic Circle without a thaw, though, they are stranded in a nightmarish
landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, with
diminishing rations, 126 men fight to survive with poisonous food, a
dwindling supply of coal, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing
ice. But their real enemy is far more terrifying. There is something out
there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a
monstrous terror constantly clawing to get in.When the expedition's
leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis
Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last,
desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. With them travels an
Inuit woman who cannot speak and who may be the key to survival, or the
harbinger of their deaths. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy
and starvation grow more terrible, and as the terror on the ice stalks
them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear that there is no
escape. The Terror swells with the heart-stopping suspense and heroic
adventure that have won Dan Simmons praise as "a writer who not only
makes big promises but keeps them" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer). With a
haunting and constantly surprising story based on actual historical
events, The Terror is a novel that will chill you to your core.

One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash

Will Alexander is the
sheriff in a small town in southern Appalachia, and he knows that the
local thug Holland Winchester has been murdered. The only thing is the
sheriff can find neither the body nor someone to attest to the killing.
Simply, almost elementally told through the voices of the sheriff, a
local farmer, his beautiful wife, their son, and the sheriff's deputy,One Foot in Eden signals the bellwether arrival of one the most mature and distinctive voices in southern literature.

The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale

The narrator of The Bottoms
is Harry Collins, an old man obsessively reflecting on certain key
experiences of his childhood. In 1933, the year that forms the
centerpiece of the narrative, Harry is 11 years old and living with his
mother, father, and younger sister on a farm outside of Marvel Creek,
Texas, near the Sabine River bottoms. Harry's world changes forever when
he discovers the corpse of a young black woman tied to a tree in the
forest near his home. The woman, who is eventually identified as a local
prostitute, has been murdered, molested, and sexually mutilated. She is
also, as Harry will soon discover, the first in a series of similar
corpses, all of them the victims of a new, unprecedented sort of
monster: a traveling serial killer.From his privileged
position as the son of constable (and farmer and part-time barber) Jacob
Collins, Harry watches as the distinctly amateur investigation unfolds.
As more bodies -- not all of them "colored" -- surface, the mood of the
local residents darkens. Racial tensions -- never far from the surface,
even in the best of times -- gradually kindle. When circumstantial
evidence implicates an ancient, innocent black man named Mose, the Ku
Klux Klan mobilizes, initiating a chilling, graphically described
lynching that will occupy a permanent place in Harry Collins's memories.
With Mose dead and the threat to local white women presumably put to
rest, the residents of Marvel Creek resume their normal lives, only to
find that the actual killer remains at large and continues to threaten
the safety and stability of the town.Lansdale uses this
protracted murder investigation to open up a window on an insular,
poverty-stricken, racially divided community. With humor, precision, and
great narrative economy, he evokes the society of Marvel Creek in all
its alternating tawdriness and nobility, offering us a varied,
absolutely convincing portrait of a world that has receded into history.
At the same time, he offers us a richly detailed re-creation of the
vibrant, dangerous physical landscapes that were part of that world and
have since been buried under the concrete and cement of the
industrialized juggernaut of the late 20th century. In Lansdale's hands,
the gritty realities of Depression-era Texas are as authentic -- and
memorable -- as anything in recent American fiction.

The Shining by Stephen KingDanny was only five
years old but in the words of old Mr Halloran he was a 'shiner', aglow
with psychic voltage. When his father became caretaker of the Overlook
Hotel his visions grew frighteningly out of control.

As winter
closed in and blizzards cut them off, the hotel seemed to develop a life
of its own. It was meant to be empty, but who was the lady in Room 217,
and who were the masked guests going up and down in the elevator? And
why did the hedges shaped like animals seem so alive?

Somewhere, somehow there was an evil force in the hotel - and that too had begun to shine...

UPDATE: I think I am switching out The Shining with 11/22/63 instead:

11/22/63 by Stephen King

Life can turn on a
dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a
high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. While grading essays
by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by
janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his
father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is blown
away...but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend
Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission
that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How?
By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era
of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette
smoke... Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new
life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee
Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten...and
become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.